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Crazy Like A Falchion: Neal Stephenson's Sword Sim Kickstarts

Hello, my name is Neal Stephenson. I’ve been writing science and historical fiction for three decades. Well, screw that. I want to make a video game.

There are ideas for Kickstarter campaigns which are manifestly and obviously good – like the Pebble. There are some which are manifestly bad – pretty much anything involving the phrase “one-man show”. And then there are some which simply defy classification.

Neal Stephenson cleans up nice. LIKE A SWORD

Enter Neal Stephenson. Better known as a writer, Stephenson appears to have decided to turn his hand to game design and development. And, not content with this radical career change, he has also decided to tackle a problem which has so far defeated large and well-established developers.

This is CLANG, a realistic PC-based sword fighting simulation which promises to allow multiple players to battle without the impression that they are simply waggling controllers randomly at each other like cyborg perverts.

Subutai, of course, was a legendary general of the Mongol horde, famous among many other conquests for the simultaneous defeat of two armies – those of Poland and Hungary – on the same day. So, I guess there is an appropriate connection there when it comes to remote combat.

Subutai Corporation was also the publisher of Stevenson’s multi-/transmedia collaboration the Mongoliad, which was itself a crazy quilt of writers, designers and historical fighting experts. One can see a clear, if somewhat bonkers, line between the two projects. Indeed, the fighting game is tied into Foreworld, the Amazon collaboration of which The Mongoliad was a part. One could be seen as a promotional tool for the other, or the two could be seen as parts of an antic whole, which seems to be the Stephenson line.

The Mongoliad, Stephenson’s interactive adventure and a means of getting a lot of swordfighters on speed dial

Much of the detail of the project, which is seeking $500,000 in funding, remains obscure – but clearly swords are involved, and the project plans to kick off by mapping and emulating the behaviour of the European longsword. Subsequently, authoring tools will allow players to add in their own blades of choice.

This is pretty Ren Faire-tastic stuff to start with. The game, or simulation, is intended to launch on the PC platform using steam. And it looks like the preferred hardware supplier, at least currently, is Razer, whose Hydra control sticks provide gestural control and boast a higher level of six-axis sensitivity than console hardware like the Wiimote and Playstation Move controller.

There’s an ongoing argument about whether Kickstarter should be used by celebrities – and indeed whether a novelist, in these post-literate times, counts as a celebrity. However, this Kickstarter appeal feels justified, despite a little wooliness on process and technology (and, while what it proposes is not impossible, it is very, very difficult – speaking as a fencer, there is no consumer-level technology fast enough to follow the movements of a real swordfight with light blades, an issue acknowledged by Subutai in the FAQ) by its erratically marvelous accompanying video, in which a cast of historical reenactors, knife throwers and a cameo by Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve Corporation, combine to make a powerful case for the incompleteness of your life without CLANG.

The appeal is already a third funded, with 27 days to go. Stretch targets include further swords, guns, cover-based shooting mechanics, drivable vehicles and Kinect integration.*

The current state of the art – Nidhogg by Messhof, the best swordfighting game in existence.

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This seems like an interesting project, but its uses would be pretty limited – by trying to recreate a sword fight as realistically as possible, you’ll be running up against the limitations of both commercially-available hardware and software, and, in the end, your product will probably be too complicated to be incorporated into other games. As far as it goes, it sounds like a really fun simulator, but I’d be much more interested in a project that aims to create new methods for modeling sword fighting short of actually trying to put a sword (motion controller) into a player’s hands. I think the bigger question ought to be: how can we create video games that are not one-for-one sword fighting simulators that still capture the excitement and dynamism of sword-play?

To take an example with which I’m more familiar: I work for a defense consultancy firm that, among other things, thinks about the future of strategy and international conflict. From time to time, I enjoy playing a conflict simulation like Harpoon, Fleet Command, or Global Conflict Blue, which seek to model conflict and strategy in a very realistic way. However, I much prefer strategy games like Starcraft, which abstract away most of the details of actually operating military forces while still retaining the basic principles of opportunity cost, information asymmetry, positional advantage, relative maneuver and strategic interaction that make armed conflict such an interesting field of study. At higher levels of play, Starcraft actually captures key aspects of strategic competition in a highly-stylized yet compelling way, even though it may not give much insight into how actual military forces operate.

Much like flight and combat simulators, I’m sure there’s room for a highly-detailed sword simulator – from a purely technical standpoint, it sounds like a really cool project. That said, I’d be much more interested to see a project that seeks to identify the most compelling aspects of a sword fight and translate them into a streamlined game interface. That kind of conceptual development would probably have much broader ramifications for a wide variety of games and a wide variety of gamers.

Very good questions – it does look like one couldn’t do this full-tilt, because the controller just isn’t sensitive enough. It seems like it has a double goal, beyond being a fun game – to create some manner of relatable database of bladed weapons, and to give a (somewhat abstract) way of working through what might happen in a fight between, say, a medieval Teutonic Knight and a samurai – which might be very useful for a science-fiction writer looking to pay around with multiple times or dimensions or simlar…

Incidentally, I’m quite serious when I say the Messhof’s Nidhogg is the state of the art in creating the _feel_ of a swordfight – or more precisely a fencing duel – despite having pixel graphics and a keyboard interface. Which I think is related to your point about abstraction – it feels very _spiritually_ pure, while physically having almost no connection at all.